Workbenches are well known. An example of a very well known and highly commercially successful workbench has been sold for many years by ‘Black & Decker’ under the Registered Trade Mark Workmate®. The workbench has folds to a relatively smaller volume for stowage. However, when professional builders, carpenters and craftsmen needed to support larger items, particularly larger wooden items, such as bookcases, window frames, doors and gates, often two or more such workbenches had to be used in combination, sometimes together with other equipment.
These additional workbenches, and ancillary equipment, added to cost as well as posed problems when cutting or sawing large work pieces, because, for example if a large door or sheet of material, (such as plasterboard) had to be cut, often the person cutting the piece did not know the location of the workbenches supporting it. The consequence of this that often the work piece obscured the view of what was below it, and workbenches were inadvertently cut or damaged by the cutting tool blade or drill. Occasionally expensive tools, the work piece or workbenches were damaged. Not only was this sometimes inconvenient, it was also dangerous, possibly giving rise to injury.
Larger items of materials used in the building and construction trades, for example door, sheet material, length of pipe or length of timber, having dimensions in the range in excess of about 0.8 m-1.2 m have therefore been difficult to handle, support and work on using conventional portable workbenches.